We all enjoy a good restaurant and inevitably assess the restaurant by the food and the service.
Would you go back to a restaurant that had tense, stressful, negative, anxious servers?
Even if the food was quality, a consistently anxious eating environment would likely be enough to lead us to avoid it all together. After all, nobody said the restaurant business was easy. 60% of restaurants don’t last a year and 80% close before their fifth anniversary.
What if I told you that if you have children, you actually already own a restaurant!
And your restaurant has a few very regular and very moldable customers.
GOOD NEWS: your restaurant is under no threat of closing.
BAD NEWS: several of the same standards we assess restaurants with as adults, our children are intuitively assessing us! Particularly the service.
In all of life, we feed off the emotions of those around us whether they are stressed, happy, or worried. When it comes to feeding our smallest customers, we set the environment, and our kids often reflect and even enhance the moods they see us projecting.
What experience would you want your adult children to have at a restaurant?
Why would that be different for them now?
Believe me, you can cultivate grateful and adventurous eaters, I’ve been able to see many homes reclaim the dinner table through my 13 years of practice. Now is the best time to start.
Let me help get you started with an initial piece of guidance: use grateful and appreciative words or phrases concerning your meal and even the process the food took to arrive.
Now, let’s get a little personal, what would you do if you went to a restaurant and the server was staring at your and critiquing every move you made? They’d regularly shout at you, “Wipe your mouth!”, “Don’t mix that together!”, “GROSS!” You get the idea. You’d be offended, extremely self-conscious, and probably begin to dislike the entire experience all together.
How many dinner tables across the country with littles fit this description? It doesn’t have to remain that way.
In the illustration above, the server would be out of line because their goal should not have been to critique our eating habits, but to make sure our eating experience was positive. So, as a parent or grandparent of a little, what if you committed yourself to a new goal?
Here’s one of the goals I have equipped hundreds of families in and have also included in my coming ‘Raising Adventurous Eaters’ class.
Here it is, “Focus on your child’s new skills rather than the amount or type of food they have eaten”.
When you see them dipping their chicken in their applesauce reply, “You are so creative with mixing different foods to eat!”
When you see them slowly do their best to scoop up a pea with their spoon say, “You have gotten SO GOOD at using spoons!”
This is just one of the goals that will transform your dinner table from an anxious time to a positive and healthier environment for you and your little customers.
Relax, enjoy the experience, and stay open for business.
I’ve equipped hundreds of families in how to raise up adventurous eaters. When we as parents gain an understanding of how to navigate and remake our picky eaters our world and theirs begins to change.
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If you have or are regularly around/feeding little ones my upcoming ‘Raising Adventurous Eaters’ course is tailored for understanding, navigating, and remaking picky eaters (sign up to join my mailing list and be notified when the course released this fall)
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Or if you’d like to explore one on one virtual counseling schedule a free initial consultation.